‘A shrine of words'

Much criticism on The Country Without a Post Office has maintained a separation of form from content, either attending to Ali's formal virtuosity or examining the political motivations that underpin his bleak portrait of the violent conflict between India, Pakistan, and separatists in Kashmir since the 1980s. This chapter seeks to synthesize these two critical trends by exploring the dynamic interplay between Ali's sustained preoccupation with landscape, architecture, and geography and his formal choices, which often disrupt readers' expectations of genre. In Ali's hands, the imaginative connection between the home and the world, which is so familiar to readers of South Asian literature, through the likes of Rabindranath Tagore, Salman Rushdie, and Anita Desai, the takes a new form: he creates a 'shrine of words', forging a mode of poetic expression that is at once alive to the fragility of a society devastated by violence and imbued with a specifically Shia Muslim religious sensibility.